"What these men represented was not 'The West' but what was for this century a relatively new kind of monied class in America, a group devoid of social responsibilities because their ties to any one place had been so attenuated."

"Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself."

"My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."

"I had only some dim and unformed sense, a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center."

"I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response."

"It occurs to me that we allow ourselves to imagine only such messages as we need to survive."

"When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there."

"Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?"

"There is no real way to deal with everything we lose."

"I'm not sure I have the physical strength to undertake a novel."

"As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become..."

"Strength is one of those things you're supposed to have. You don't feel that you have it at the time you're going through it."

"People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things."

"The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried."

"The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language."

"More than anyone else in the society, these men had apparently dreamed the dream and made it work. And what they did then was to build a place which seems to illustrate, as in a child's primer, that the production ethic led step by step to unhappiness, to restrictiveness, to entrapment in the mechanics of living."

"Do not whine... Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone."

"Memories are what you no longer want to remember."

"Their suburbia house in Brentwood' was how she referred to the house when we bought it, a twelve-year-old establishing that it was not her decision, not her taste, a child claiming the distance all children imagine themselves to need."

"We still counted happiness and health and love and luck and beautiful children as 'ordinary blessings."

"I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat."

"I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. And I have asked to be where no storms come."

"I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years."

"I know what the fear is.The fear is not for what is lost.What is lost is already in the wall.What is lost is already behind the locked doors.The fear is for what is still to be lost."

"We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all."

"Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar."

"Webley Edwards was on the radio, they remember that, and what he said that morning again and again was 'This is an air raid, take cover, this is the real McCoy. That is not a remarkable thing to say, but it is a remarkable thing to have in one's memory."

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We live entirely by the impression of a narrative line upon disparate images, the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience."

"Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car.They live by symbols. They read meaning into the barrage of spam on the unused computer, the delete key that stops working, the imagined abandonment in the decision to replace it."

"My father was dead, my mother was dead, I would need for a while to watch for mines, but I would still get up in the morning and send out the laundry. I would still plan a menu for Easter lunch. I would still remember to renew my passport. Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life."

"Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price."

"I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome."

"I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story."

"I went on a book tour immediately after 9/11. I was due to leave the following Wednesday, so I just did. It was an amazing thing, because planes hadn't been flying very many days, and I got on this plane and went to San Francisco, and the minute that plane lifted above the clouds, I felt this incredible sense of lightness."

"Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lectures fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place."

"A doctor to whom I occasionally talk suggest that I have made an inadequate adjustment to aging.Wrong, I want to say.In fact I have made no adjustment whatsoever to aging.In fact I had lived my entire life to date without seriously believing that I would age."

"I bought new strings of colored lights. This served as a profession of faith in the future. I take the opportunity for such professions where and when I can invent them, since I do not yet actually feel this faith in the future."

"I realized that for the time being I could not trust myself to present a coherent face to the world."

"The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers."

"The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle."

"To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything."

"It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?"

"Writers are always selling somebody out."

"Why did I think that this improvisation could never end? If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently? What would he?"